The 92nd Street Y invited a number of bloggers to last night’s Francine and Abdallah Simon State of World Jewry Lecture, as philosopher Bernard=Henri Lévy weighed in on the ways that anti-semitism has reconfigured itself for the 21st century. “I am a few months younger than Israel,” Lévy quipped at the start of his speech, but he cannot remember any moment in his lifetime when the nation seemed “as lonely, as vulnernable, and as threatened” as it is now, particularly as the anti-semitism that he sees at the root of much anti-Zionist rhetoric has become more openly expressed. “The dikes are broken,” he warned, citing the UN conference at Durban and the boycotts being mounted against book fairs in Paris and Turin which have chosen to honor Israel’s contributions to world literature. “They had nothing to say three years ago when China was invited,” Lévy said of the writers withdrawing from the Paris event. “They had nothing to say five years ago when Russia was invited… And they were right. The writers are one thing; Putin is another.”
But as the idea that Israel is somehow the greatest threat to international peace gains traction around the world, Lévy teases out the three propositions underpinning this new anti-semitism. After anti-Zionism comes Holocaust denial, or its only slightly weaker cousin, which acknowledges the Nazi atrocities but accuses Jews of exaggerating them in a ploy for sympathy, followed by “the competition of victims,” which champions the Palestinian cause by demonizing Israel. As Lévy noted, even Jimmy Carter can fall prey to this rhetoric, as seen in his recent book accusing the Israeli government of “apartheid.”
So what can Jews do against this pernicious worldview. “Respond blast for blast,” Lévy urged, and dismantle this new anti-semitic rhetoric before it coalesces into a political movement with real power. (As he noted, the new anti-semites are openly looking to acquire nuclear weapons, and if they get them, they plan to use them.) He also called upon Jews to strengthen their alliances with other persecuted groups, and to work whatever influence they could muster to ensure that moderate Muslims prevail in that religion’s internal struggle with fundamentalism. (He even suggested that the Koran might benefit from the application of Talmudic reading.) And, he noted, “the morale of Israel is at its best,” and ready to deal with this threat. “The best defense is attack,” he said, citing Clausewitz, “and the best attack is confrontation.”
After the lecture, and signing books for some fans, Lévy made his way to a private reception in a side gallery, where, as press photographers snapped away, his editor at Random House, Will Murphy, discussed lecture points with NY Times journalists Alex Star and Rachel Donadio, while Lauren Cerand told me she’d seen Isabella Rossellini and Daphne Guinness, and confirmed that I had indeed spotted former GalleyCat editor Sarah Weinman at the other end of the room.